Carved Mountains

[Peter Toth]

Hello Guild,

Here's another test of a new algorithm, using the contour shading from the website "Maps for Free.com." Still somewhat mediocre but always striving for realism.



Let me know what you think.

Peter

[waldronate]

I would say that you should be very careful with inviting comparisons to real-world data, especially without stating what you're doing (that is, the scale of the map and the intended purpose of the map). Something that immediately jumped out at me due to the coloring s that there's nowhere on Earth that really looks like what you're showing here in terms of the amount of each of the colors on the map. Another feature that this color scheme (bright yellow mid tones) highlights is that your river channels are too uniformly wiggly. I understand that it's due to the tools that you're using (an erosion model that treats all landscape features as equally erodable will give that effect), but it still looks highly unnatural. The only places where you get things like that are uniformly soft terrain that's eroding rapidly (there are relatively small areas in northwestern Afghanistan and southern France that have that same broad character of erosion, but over a much narrower altitude range and more limited extent relative to nearby terrain).
I think that this scheme makes the terrain look less plausible than some of your earlier works. Modulating the base color via lighting (or even using texture shading) might reduce the impact of the fully saturated land colors.